# Fantasy Golf Projections – Wells Fargo Championship 2016

May 3, 2016 at 2:56 am

What follows are my projections for the Wells Fargo Championship, May 5-8, 2016. I projected chance to win, chance to make the cut and expected DraftKings points.

The projections were made thusly:

1. Using every complete round played on the PGA tour from 2010-2016, I calculated the z score  for each golfer described in detail here. I assumed that golf scores are normally distributed, and then standardized them. I took each player’s score (${X}$) subtracted the mean of all players for that round (${\mu}$) and divided by the standard deviation of that round (${\sigma}$). If you’ve taken stats you might recognize this equation: ${(X – \mu) / \sigma}$. A negative z score is good – it means your score is below average, which is good in golf.
2. I corrected each z score according to the strength of each field (not all fields are created equal). To calculate, I took the 2 year average raw z scores of the field that played in each round and added it to the raw z score for each player.
3. I calculated the 50 score moving average of adjusted z scores (${\theta}$) and the standard deviation of those scores (${s}$).
4. I found the average score and standard deviation for the Wells Fargo Championship over the last five years. I took the two parameters for each player from 3, ${\theta}$ and ${s}$, and scaled them to fit the current tournament.
5. Then using a monte carlo simulation, I played the tournament 20,000 times. I used the tournament specific ${\theta}$ and ${s}$ for each player to randomly determine their scores.
6. Two pars are worth 1.0 DraftKings points (0.5 each) while one birdie and one bogey, still even par for 2 holes, are worth 2.5 points (3 – 0.5). Therefore if two players shoot the same score, a player who tends to make more birdies as well as more bogeys will tend to have a higher score on DraftKings than a player that tends to make a lot of pars. For this reason, for each simulated round, I matched each player’s simulated score to his past DraftKings scores when he’s shot the same score under par.

The results are summarized in the following google spreadsheet:

If you’d rather work with the spreadsheet directly, click here.

The projection for Jim Furyk should be disregarded. He hasn’t played since last year because of injury.